knittinggothgirl:huffingtonpost:This Is What Happens When You Mix Coca-Cola And MilkIn this fascinating YouTube video, watch what happens when milk is added to a bottle of Coke. After an hour, the liquid in the bottle appears to become clear, as brown sediment sinks to the bottom.Find out the scientific explanation behind this chemical reaction here. \/ OR READ BELOW!! \/ :0To my followers and future rebloggers, I know how much I hate to move my thumb while scrolling so the reaction
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During SDSU’s 2015 Writers’ Conference, I was lucky enough to attend some of the workshops run by the lovely Marcy Rockwell and Gini Koch. Marcy has an uncanny way of summing up important advice in neat little phrases. Here are some highlights: 1. Your first idea probably isn’t your best, set it aside then come […]

futurescope:
Telescopic contact lenses and wink-control glasses
…The first iteration of the telescopic contact lens—which magnifies 2.8 times—was announced in 2013. Since then the scientists behind the DARPA-funded project have been fine-tuning the lens membranes and developing accessories to make the eyewear smarter and more comfortable for longer periods of time, and thus more usable in every day life.
[read more] [Photo Credit: Eric Tremblay and Joe Ford. Courtesy of
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Researchers from Johns Hopkins University have teamed two powerful technologies to correct sickle cell disease in a lab dish. Linzhao Cheng and colleagues have deployed CRISPR/Cas-9 on iPS cells to replace the mutant beta globin gene, published in Stem Cells.
ACRONYMS AND ABBREVIATIONS
CRISPR conjures up images of fried chicken, but it stands for “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats” – short repeated DNA sequences interspersed with areas called spacers, […]

March 14, 2015

Empty seats at FedEx Field by Ron Cogswell via Flickr I grew up in the Washington, D.C. area watching Redskins football with my family. I haven’t seen a Redskins game since I moved away from the area in the early 2000’s, and now I couldn’t name more than 1 player currently on the team. But I have a strong opinion about them: I think they suck. They are terrible and their incompetent owner has destroyed the team. Why do I have a strong opinion on […]

The Skeptical Raptor, stalking pseudoscience in the internet jungle.
Some of you use Google’s Feedburner system to get notified of posts here and other blogs. Unfortunately, Google has deprecated Feedburner and no long supports it (and hasn’t since 2012). I’ve begun to notice a lot of errors crop up (not just here but from other blogs) from Feedburner emails. As a result, I’ve removed … Continue reading Website housekeeping note–Google Feedburner
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What happens when you combine two of the most popular features here at BiotechDueDiligence - Tweets of the Week and Journal Watch? You get a Twitter-sourced collection of intriguing and noteworthy articles from scientific and medical journals. I've been meaning to try this for awhile, so let me know what you think! Our survey of P hacking (eg overanalysis to get p<0.05) led by Megan Head is out http://t.co/z5WSNHBkBz @LukeHolman_Evo @RobLanfear— Michael Jennions […]

exploratorium:Pi has been known for almost 4000 years—but even if we calculated the number of seconds in those 4000 years and calculated pi to that number of places, we would still only be approximating its actual value. Here’s a brief history of finding pi:The ancient Babylonians calculated the area of a circle by taking 3 times the square of its radius, which gave a value of pi = 3. One Babylonian tablet (ca. 1900–1680 BC) indicates a value of 3.125 for pi, which is a closer
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futurescope:
Future of Sports: Segway Polo is a thing
The Segway Polo world championship is the Woz Challenge Cup. Nuff said.
[via wired] [wikipedia: segway polo]
This is ridiculous, but also might be the best use of a Segway that I’ve ever seen.

The Skeptical Raptor, stalking pseudoscience in the internet jungle.
This article is by Dorit Rubinstein Reiss, Professor of Law at the University of California Hastings College of the Law (San Francisco, CA). She is a frequent contributor to this and many other blogs, providing in-depth, and intellectually-stimulating, articles about vaccines (generally, but sometimes moving to other areas of medicine), social policy and the law. Her articles unwind the … Continue
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I've currently got three positions open in my lab and thought I'd use this blog as another way to get the message out to prospective candidates. Two people recently moved onto new jobs; one in Inivata (the first spin-out from CRUK-CI) and one at AbCam, and another person was recently promoted. We're also busy so we're also recruiting for a six-month temporary contract to help out with the sequencing services.If you want to see what the lab does please take a look at our lab website and
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March 13, 2015

This week's edition of the Biotech Tweets of the Week is captained by ACAD - simply the large peak to trough move in sentiment in a one day period that I can ever recall. Enjoy the compilation about this and many other story lines, c/o @23aloha.Top tickers: $ACAD $ACRX $CTIC $ZGNX $BLUE $SLXP $AMRN $TTPH $CUR $XBI $IBB [...]

micdotcom:NASA: The U.S. is headed for a disaster not seen in 1,000 years A new study, compiled by scientists from the space agency, Cornell University and Columbia University, predicts an 80% chance that the Great Plains and the American Southwest will endure a major weather
shift beginning in 2050. "We really need to start thinking in longer-term horizons about how we’re going to manage it."
But we’ll see some strong sustainability policies put into place to help
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Not all crops are created equal when it comes to the science love they receive. A lot of fruit and vegetables are lagging far behind in terms of basic genetic resources compared to their major grain counterparts (think corn, soybean, wheat, rice). However, the USDA is making $66.5 million available to the specialty crop and … Continue reading Organic, specialty growers reap pay day
The post Organic, specialty growers reap pay day appeared first on Plant DNA Science.

What will you be doing on 3/14/15 at precisely 9:26:53? Twice the clocks will align with the first few digits of my favorite irrational and transcendental number (3.141592653…) or π. Over 1 trillion digits to the right of the decimal point have been calculated, and they still go on, never making a pattern, never repeating. […]

> Super Cells has grown wings and flown over to Newcastle. Yes, I know, you’re struck dumb at the improbability of this terrible metaphor, but far less than I am: having reviewed every word, every animation, every image, every concept of this exhibit, I’m completely baffled at how the feather follicle stem cells snuck in there...Read more

This week’s SNPpets include new nomenclature guidelines from the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics (ACMG) on what to call a variant in medical situations; a HapMap for wheat; and a spanking for vendor sites that over-promise in personal cancer testing. Oh–and an undergrad genome class that teaches sequencing. Welcome to our Friday feature […]

I caught up with a new company on the target capture scene, Directed Genomics, at AGBT. Their approach is based on a simple idea: if you want to sequence exomes, why not capture only exons? Most exome-seq methods (Illumina, Agilent, Nimblegen) use oligo-baits to pull-down adapter-ligated fragment libraries, with fragments of 200-300bp. As exons are only 170bp long (80–85% Human exons less than 200bp Zhu et al & Sakharkar et al) we sequence lots of near- or off-target bases. These can
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Citations

About five million people in the US suffer from heart failure, and approximately half of them die within five years of being diagnosed. Only about 2,500 people a year receive a heart transplant – the treatment of last resort. A new heart can be life-saving, but it is also life-changing. Even under the best conditions, the surgery is complex, and recovery carries a heavy physical and emotional burden. And not all heart transplant recipients fare equally well after the surgery.... Read more

Anhedonia: the inability to experience pleasure from activities usually found enjoyable.Although by no means an expert on anhedonia (or much else), I believe that it is a concept quite important when it comes to making a diagnosis of depression although the precise hows and whys of connecting anhedonia to other symptoms are still the source of some discussion [1].The paper from Vicki Bitsika & Christopher Sharpley [2] brings the concepts of anhedonia and depression into
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Almost one in five college students are so sensitive to common, annoying sounds like lip smacking and pen clicking that they may have misophonia—a little-understood condition where people overreact to irritating noises. The results come from a University of South … Continue reading →

While the brain might not have more connections than stars in the universe (sorry guys), it is still complex. In fact, someone I respect defined a neuroscientist as “someone who knows how little we know about the brain.” Despite the decades worth of data that has been collected about the billions of neurons in the […]

This boy may be influencing who he will marry when he grows up. Photo by Orrling at Wikimedia Commons.Animals (including humans) are swarming with microorganisms both on and in our bodies. Humans harbor so many different microorganisms that we have over 150 times more microbial genes than mammalian genes, and it is reasonable to suspect that this scenario is similar for most animals. But before you run to soak in a tub of hand sanitizer, you should realize that many of these microorganisms are
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A new study by Sarah Moffitt, Tessa Hill, Peter Roopnarine, and James Kennett (Response of seafloor ecosystems to abrubt global climate change) gets a handle on the effects of relatively rapid warming and associated Oxygen loss in the sea on invertebrate communities. The study looked at a recent warming event (the end of the last…